JavaScript link tracking with Google Analytics

Google Analytics is great to tracking your site traffic. I started out using Statcounter.com to track my site visits, but over the years i’ve wanted more information so I switched over to using Google Analytics. Google provides an excellent dashboard to monitor and dig into your sites traffic and drill down the information to see exactly what content on your site is popular. For advertising campaigns at MySpace we use a JavaScript technique to track specific clicks on content on a page, with the ability to label specific content using the ‘name’ attribute. I’m providing the jQuery and Mootools code to implement this below. By using this technique when you view what content has been clicked in the analytics dashboard, and instead of seeing a bunch of long urls with various parameters in you can easily see a readable label as to what that link really is as shown below.

jQuery Version

So below is a simple ‘click’ function that basically gets the value of the name attribute from any link that we set on our page and sends it to the analytics code at the bottom of our document.

Here’s an example of a link:

<a href=&quot;http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&rlz=1G1GGLQ_ENGB314&q=papermashup.com&btnG=Search&meta=&aq=f&oq=name=&quot;papermashup search on Google;&gt;Search Google&lt;/>

$('document').ready(function () {
    $('a').click(function(){
        Pagetracker._trackPageview('/outgoing/' + $(this).attr('name'));
		});
	});

This is the analytics tracking code that will go just before the closing body tag on your page.

<script type="text/javascript">
var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? "https://ssl." : "http://www.");
document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + gaJsHost + "google-analytics.com/ga.js' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E"));
</script>
<script type="text/javascript">
try {
var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-6393355-53");
pageTracker._trackPageview('/outgoing');
} catch(err) {}</script> 

Mootools Version

This is exactly that same technique as above with the jQuery version but replicated with Mootools.

window.addEvent('load', function() {
		$$('a[name]').each(function(el) {
			el.addEvent('click',function() {
				var dd = '/outgoing/' + el.get('gaid');
				_gat._getTracker("UA-YOUR TRACKING ID")._trackPageview(dd);
			}.bind(this));
		});
});

So to sum up. To make your links easier to read in Google analytics add the name attribute to any link so when it’s clicked it will register with Google.